by Daniel Mason
A woman took her arm and led her away. ‘There are so many people who want to pray,’ said the woman. ‘There are too many people. The most desperate people come to the city and the most desperate people in the city come to pray to Saint Jude.’ She caressed Isabel’s hand. ‘Why are you here?’ she asked. I took the wrong bus, Isabel thought, but she said, ‘At home there is a drought.’ ‘Was,’ said the woman. ‘Not anymore. You should be grateful. All over the backlands, there is rain.’
The woman left her in the street.
A procession began, and she joined, falling in behind three hooded members of a brotherhood. Saint Jude wobbled on the back of a pickup. The crowds passed the flashing lights of bingo parlors, alcohol rehabilitation centers, evangelical churches, apartments filled with distant faces. They walked through rich neighborhoods, with high walls and electric fences. They sang hymns to Saint Jude and recited Hail Marys. They carried lit candles in the cut halves of bottles. The rims of the bottles puckered; the air smelled of incense and melting plastic. At times they merged onto larger roads, sharing them with buses that lumbered toward the shrouded light of downtown.
She felt carried along by the procession, which had swollen to impossible numbers, filling the road and overflowing into the side streets. As they walked, a vertigo seized her and the singing seemed to get louder until it filled her ears like a siren screeching. She wanted to go back and take a bus home, but each time she stopped the vertigo worsened, so she kept walking. What is this noise? she wondered, grimacing, putting her free hand to her ear. They turned up a long street, and she stared around her into the sea of bobbing candles. Is anyone else hearing this? She walked faster, and then suddenly it was quiet.
It was then that she saw Isaias. He was far ahead, where the procession climbed a soft rise in the road. She recognized his silhouette first, then the sway in his step. Frantically, she tried to push her way to him, but the procession had stopped, the truck carrying Saint Jude had stalled. ‘Patience,’ came the whispers, ‘Don’t push, Soon we will be moving again, we all will get there soon.’ She called out, but another hymn had begun. Ahead the truck started again, the crowd surged, her brother disappeared behind the high cinder-block walls of a corner house. ‘No!’ she cried aloud, trying to push her way through the crowd. ‘Stop!’ She shoved between a couple holding hands. ‘Let me through!’ she said. ‘I will lose him again!’ She was blocked by a wall of shoulders. She tugged at their arms. ‘Let me through! I will lose him!’ A woman with a candle in her bare fist turned: ‘You won’t lose him. Your time will come. He can’t go anywhere, he’s only plaster.’
She rounded the corner. This time she saw Isaias walking at the edge of the crowd, singing. When he lifted his head, she saw he was thin, with dark sunken spaces around his eyes. She tried to shout again, but his name fell as a whisper. He walked on. He shouldn’t be thin like that, she thought, and for a long time it was the only thought she had.
So she followed. Or, she let herself be carried along with him, and when at last the statue of Saint Jude returned to the altar, she watched Isaias cross himself, descend the steps of the church and head up the long road, his body red in the brake lights of the inching traffic. She waited. A siren wailed, a little boy pushed past her, an old woman limped up the steps. She expected a sign to tell her to follow: a light, a ripple in the air, a wind, a keening. None came. The red lights inched forward. Crossing herself, she descended.
On the steps, the wind ruffled piles of invocation cards, matted together like wet leaves.
The crowd fell away quickly. At the threshold of a dark stretch of broken lamps, she told herself to go back. ‘It isn’t him,’ she said aloud. ‘It’s my mind, I’m imagining like I imagined I was following him before.’ She pinched her hand and inhaled Hugo’s faint scent of soap and talcum. She felt her arm burn with his weight. She thought of calling to Isaias, but the words eluded her. They passed an open canteen, where two old men played an accordion and a triangle. She breathed in the sudden warmth and heard a fragment of a melody. Then the street was cold again. There was a light mist, but she knew it wouldn’t rain.
Isaias turned down an empty side street. She followed. She wanted to run to him, but something in his walk told her to wait until she understood what had happened and why he was there. So she remained a block behind and in the shadows. After a long time, she looked back. The lights of the church lit a distant halo in the mist. It seemed very small and very far away.
In her arms, Hugo cried.
Isaias stopped. Behind him, she waited. He didn’t turn. Then he walked on.
She knew then that he knew she was following. No one from the backlands would allow themselves to be followed by a stranger.
After many blocks, she sensed him slowing. She walked closer until finally she was at his side. She waited for him to say something, fighting the need to touch him, to jump on him, to push him, to grab his hand. She wrapped her arms tighter around the baby. Once or twice, Isaias turned to her, but when she looked up at him, he turned away. So they walked in silence, like they had walked in silence before.
She ceased to be tired. The pain in her feet disappeared. The baby grew light, floating on her like a scrap of warmth.
Now, as she waited for an explanation, her mind wandered. She found herself remembering the first retreat, the darkness of the shelters, the charqui and the yellow dog. She felt the soft wind of the collapsing tents and heard the rain on the fallen canvas. She remembered, for the first time in her life, the trip home, the tired people waiting for a car and then setting out on the trail. She remembered clinging to her mother, and then, farther down the road, her father, then being passed from hand to hand until she reached her brother, where she became weightless and slept. She remembered this perfectly, the smell, the taste of dust and sweat on his shirt, his hand around her back, the trembling in his arm as the road stretched on.
It was then, in the midst of these memories, that the explanation came and once it came, she felt as if she had always known. By then the street seemed to have disappeared. There were no blackened lights, no shuttered houses with their barbed wire. It was like being in the cane when the cane was only emptiness: there was only a source and something that pulled her toward it. A gravity, she thought, she would spend the rest of her life trying to explain this, and the words would never be there. Just as he could never say: There is no music, there is no band, there is no beautiful girl in the square. There are no bars by the sea. There are no restaurants, no compliments from men who say that I have true talent. Those are words that I invented. In the world I must live in, I am just like everyone else, caught in the movement of those who have nothing. It has been this way since the beginning, since the day I saw you coming up the hill, since I saw you waving your flag in that valley of towers, when the streets were full but there was no one else there but you. I saw you looking for me, I saw you stop and break the crowds and drive the whole city to a halt, stop the flows of people through its streets, stop the fleets of perches hurtling south, stop the retreat of the clouds and send them swarming back into the backlands. I came to your door, but I did not have the courage to go in.
Is there any other answer? Any other explanation than my awe of you: a slope of cursive in a church register, a crackling of twigs beside me, a silent companion who cast me into the world by your belief that I was anything other than what I really am, a cane cutter like my father, wrapped in the same rags as the other cane cutters, beating the same burnt and crumbling path through an endless field that belongs to someone else. That you are the single person in the world who makes me more than what everyone else sees: that you created me, that in your mind lives the person I wish to be.
He could not say: There is no fiddle, I tried for a month and then I pawned it and sent the money home. The rest was a lie. That’s all.
She could see the end of the road, where there was a bridge and the glint of train rails. She followed him down a crumbling stairwell, to the edge of the t
rack, dark and littered with broken glass.
They walked for a long time along the rails. Then he entered a narrow alley that curled through the planked walls of a shantytown. He led her over a low rise, and they entered a field. There was a highway, empty save a rare car that appeared and disappeared like a fleeting thought.
He descended a short slope to a culvert and a corrugated drainage tunnel beneath the highway. She stayed back and watched him disappear inside. When he emerged, he was carrying something in his arms. He handed it to her. There was a blanket, a plastic bottle of water and an orange. She mixed the water with the little bit of formula that remained from the long day that had begun watching the egrets’ veils and thinking of wasps. She wrapped the blanket around herself and the baby.
There was a wide stone on the bank. They crouched together and stared into the darkness. She peeled the orange with her teeth and split it in two. She offered it to him, but he shook his head.
Perhaps she slept, because dawn came soon. He rose. Still wearing the blanket, she followed him up the bank and to the edge of the road. The verge was narrow, and she walked behind him. He was a dark spot against the sun, and it hurt her eyes to look there.
In the distance, she could see the rise of the hill, the vultures circling in the air. Cars passed, the drivers leaning on their horns, but she didn’t care. Her brother left the road and descended the embankment, hopped the thin stream that ran through the culvert and took long steps toward a cluster of ramshackle houses. It was then that she was aware of the other figures marching behind her on the highway, emerging from the shanties and climbing the slope toward the dump.
They came from all directions. They crossed the road and followed her down the shoulder, passing as she slowed. They walked in groups or they came alone. They were women and men of all ages and children who chased one another down the slope. They pulled carts and dragged burlap sacks behind them.
At the gate, she paused. He was already halfway up the hill, winding up a long and narrow path. She wanted to go on, but she couldn’t. She remembered the story of the scavengers, who made beauty from things that others had discarded. She felt then that she was standing at the edge of a sacred place, like the silent shade of a cathedral or an offering in the middle of a backlands road. So she stopped, and watched the shadows of the people rise up the mountain. She remained below, stroking the baby’s hair, and she waited for her brother to come down.
Theresa
Summer came and then another winter of rain. In Saint Michael, the cane blossomed again. When the harvest was over, her father found a job laying pavement at the edge of Prince Leopold. He spent the week there and came home on the weekends, to see her mother, who refused to leave their village.
In the city, families continued to arrive. The Settlements spread into the forest. Cinder-block houses went up in place of shacks, and a clinic was built on the hill. In the windows of the houses, hanging sheets changed like changing leaves. Manuela constructed a second story and rented it to a migrant family with four children and a brindled dog that came with them on the trip down south.
The evening he came down from the hill, Isaias returned with Isabel to New Eden. They walked in silence on the shoulder of the highway until they reached an empty bus pavilion. He held the baby until the bus came. When they reached the hill, a group of women was gathered in the road. They grew quiet when they saw the two of them coming, and parted to let them pass.
That night, he said, ‘I’ve been working there almost since I arrived. Manuela doesn’t know. I came here, to the door, but I couldn’t—’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know all of it.’
She knew he wouldn’t say more. He called the north, but he turned from Isabel as he spoke, and she couldn’t hear what he said. Two days later, when Manuela came home, he told her he had been working in a gold mine in the interior.
‘There aren’t any phones,’ said Isabel. ‘He sent letters, but they didn’t arrive. It’s very far.’
They strung a hammock for him to sleep. He began to go down to the highways to wait for pickups trolling for day laborers. Weeks passed without work, and he spoke about returning to the mountain. Then he found a job setting pylons for a bridge, and later as an assistant gardener with the city. He was promoted quickly. He laughed and told Isabel, ‘Rich black soil and still these people can’t grow anything.’ In New Eden, he met a man with a fiddle, and at night, while the man worked as a watchman, he borrowed it and played with an accordionist who lived down the hill.
Elections came, and Isabel’s candidate lost. New Eden filled with a victory celebration. Josiane told her about a factory in the East Zone making plush toys for fairground prizes. They sat together for an interview with a foreman who erased her questionnaire and rewrote her age as ‘18.’
In the mornings, she descended the hill alongside the day maids and the construction workers and the other day-shifters. The buses were full, and the fare collectors packed the aisles as tight as possible. They stood shoulder to shoulder and clung to the handrails. Sometimes the ride took two hours, but she didn’t mind. She could watch the people and imagine their lives. She learned that because she was silent, they told her stories she couldn’t imagine. In a barren industrial neighborhood she joined a long file that passed through the doors of the factory, punched in, donned a light pink bonnet and a mask with the black letters ISABEL and took up her spot on an assembly line, where she sewed and stuffed and snipped until the lunch bell rang. In the factory cafeteria, she sat with Josiane. Then the bell rang again and she sewed and stuffed and snipped until the end of her shift, punched out and took the bus home. Alin returned from the north. Some evenings she helped him with his work. Her job was to look through a pile of scavenged magazines and cut out images for his portraits. On Saturdays she walked with him to deliver them. On Sundays, after church, Isaias took her to the park. She remembered their old walks, and in those memories she was very young and small.
They left Hugo with the woman who used to watch him. It cost a quarter of a day’s wage, so in the spring, Manuela’s youngest sister came down from Saint Michael. She was thirteen. Her name was Theresa. When she opened her bag, Isabel could smell the dry earth from the north. The smell remained for a week, and then it was gone. They strung a second hammock next to Isaias, and Isabel explained how everything would be.
A Note About the Author
Daniel Mason is also the author of The Piano Tuner.
He lives in California.